Thursday, August 13, 2015

In the wake of Tracy Morgan crash, technology should also come under scrutiny

Now that the National Transportation Safety Board has issued
its report on last year’s fatal New Jersey Turnpike crash involving a Walmart
tractor trailer and a limousine van carrying actor-comedian Tracy Morgan and
others, the investigation may be closed, but the fallout could be just
beginning.

The NTSB issued nine recommendations to various state and
federal agencies, and reiterated another half-dozen previously issued recommendations
on everything from guidance for traffic engineers on the use of supplemental
traffic control strategies for work zones to minimum training standards for
organizations providing emergency medical services on the New Jersey turnpike.

Mark Valentini, OOIDA director of legislative affairs, said
the incident garnered more attention than usual because of the involvement of a
celebrity like Morgan.

“There’s a chance that something actionable might come of it
on the regulatory side,” he said. “I think the industry needs to be prepared
for that.”

The crash, which occurred near Cranbury, N.J., in June of
last year, ultimately resulted in the death of comedian James “Jimmy Mack”
McNair and serious injuries for Morgan and other passengers. The NTSB investigators
said the failure of Morgan and other passengers in the limo to wear seat belts
contributed to the severity of their injuries when the vehicle was rear-ended
by a tractor trailer, driven by Kevin Roper. None of the passengers in the back
of the 10-seat limo, nor the driver, were wearing seatbelts.

Roper, who commuted from Georgia to a Walmart distribution
center in Delaware, was found to have been awake for at least 28 hours straight
prior to the crash.

Roper’s tractor,a 2011 Peterbilt, was equipped with a
forward-collision mitigation system that, for reasons investigators weren’t
able to determine, did not appear to issue an alert to the driver prior to the
crash.

“As far as the failure of the forward-collision mitigation
system, I don’t know if this is going to set off any alarm bells at FMCSA for
any of the people that tried to push this stuff,” he said. “It should. (The
Association) should certainly call attention to it and be like, ‘Look it didn’t
work.’ The one real-world case we have so far and it failed. I think that’s a
point we need to bring up, especially when FMCSA starts pushing its ‘Beyond
Compliance’ program …”

Valentini said the NTSB board members’ concerns about
whether the technology works the way it’s supposed to dovetails closely with
OOIDA’s concerns about the overreliance of technology as a substitute for
driver training.

“Oh absolutely, and the fact that carriers want to get CSA
credit through Beyond Compliance (for using the technology),” he said. “Now we
have a case where the technology was in use in a real-world situation, and it
didn’t work. It didn’t work the way it was supposed to.”

Valentini said professional drivers should be concerned that
despite the technology not being “100 percent” it’s still taking control of the
vehicle out of the driver’s hands.

He said NTSB board member Earl Weener, a former aviation
engineer, had a particularly incisive line of questioning at yesterday’s
hearing regarding whether or not the Forward Collision Warning System on the
tractor worked properly prior to the crash. NTSB investigators said they were
unable to recover any data from the device that showed it had issued warnings
prior to the impact. One of the board’s recommendations to equipment
manufacturers is that the systems be designed to store and retrieve data that would
help investigators conduct performance analyses of the systems in future
crashes.

“You want the technology to work,” Valentini said. “Whether
you want it mandated is another conversation.”

Valentini, who attended Tuesday’s NTSB meeting in person, said
he was also disappointed that neither the board nor the investigators took
Walmart to task for hiring a driver from Georgia to commute to Delaware and
make deliveries along the eastern seaboard.

“Last I heard, they have Walmarts down in Atlanta,” he said.
“Why couldn’t they hire him for that? Now, obviously, the driver has a
responsibility too. I’m sure Walmart hired him thinking he’d be responsible and
not drive from Atlanta to Delaware before switching to a CMV and working for
another 14 hours. (But) NTSB never touched on that. They never asked, ‘Why did
Walmart hire a guy who lives 800 miles away to drive a truck and how did they
think he was going to get to work?’ NTSB didn’t touch on that at all, not once.
Didn’t talk about Walmart’s responsibility in any of this, other than whatever
technology was installed in the truck.”

The NTSB investigation did report that Walmart has since
amended its hiring policy to require all drivers to live within 250 miles of
the distribution center from which they would dispatch.

Among the other recommendations the NTSB is trotting back
out is a previous recommendation to FMCSA for motor carriers to adopt a
“fatigue management program” for drivers. Valentini said such programs have the
potential to be intrusive to drivers during off-duty hours.

“This is not the first time they’ve made this recommendation
to FMCSA,” he said. “I imagine (a hypothetical fatigue management program)
would be something a compliance company like J.J. Keller would come in and say,
‘Oh we have a manual for that.’ So when you send in your application for
authority, you throw in those manuals. At least from a carrier perspective,
they’d have some kind of program that would probably be intrusive if it were
adhered to. I think a carrier can have a fatigue program and not adhere to it
because they don’t have to come up with (urine) samples.”

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